Did UNC Break Federal Law? UNC Academic Fraud and Implications for Pell Grant Awards

by Ted Tatos

Yesterday, I discussed the evidence that UNC violated its own academic policy regarding the limits on independent studies as a follow-up to Dan Kane's article in the News and Observer.  (for more details on this issue, Mr. Kane's article is highly recommended.) The implications for violating this policy reach beyond the academic fraud issues and could impact the validity of UNC's Pell Grant awards.

Why?  Enrollment status is used to determine federal student aid awards.  A student enrolled half-time only receives half of the award given to a student enrolled full-time.  The determination is made based on credits towards the degree in which the student is enrolled.

Courses students took in excess of the 12-hour total and 6-hour per semester total did not count toward the degree.  The Federal Student Aid Handbook states:

If a student is enrolled in courses that do not count toward his degree, they cannot be used to determine enrollment status unless they are noncredit or remedial courses as described in the sidebar. This means you cannot award the student aid he would otherwise not receive for classes that do not count toward his degree or certificate.

FSA Handbook, 2004-2005 at Page 1-10.  (the language is virtually the same across years.  I used 2004-2005 because it corresponds to the example I use below.  An archive of FSA Handbooks can be found here.)

The implication of this policy is this:  If the credits counted for the degree, they did so in apparent violation of UNC's own policy limiting independent study credits to 12 hours total and 6 per semester.  If the credits did not count toward the degree, then a Pell Grant violation may have occurred, if the amount of award, when given, exceeded the amount commensurate with the number of courses taken that counted toward the degree.

For example, in Spring 2005, Rashad McCants, a UNC MBB player, took 4 independent studies for 12 credits.  According to his own statements, he did not attend class, did little or no work, and yet still made the Dean's List.   That may represent academic fraud, but, if Mr. McCants was receiving Federal Student Aid in Spring 2005, it would also represent a potential violation of federal law on UNC's part.  Mr. McCants had already taken at least 15 credits' worth of independent studies.  So, by UNC policy, none of the 12 credits he took in Spring 2005 should have counted toward the degree, meaning he could not receive federal student aid.  

Whether he did or not, I don't know.  I am simply using Mr. McCants' case as an example.  But there is clear evidence in the documents that many athletes received federal student aid and that athletes exceeded the University limits on independent study credits.  

While this issue also impacts the current NCAA investigation of UNC, the latest findings raise the question of whether UNC broke federal law by including courses that should not have counted toward students' degrees to determine aid eligibility.  

And if UNC did it, how widespread is the problem?  Are federal dollars, designed to assist students in obtaining an education, actually being used instead to ensure athlete eligibility to continue funding athletic department coffers?  

Did UNC Mislead SACS and NCAA?

Making Sense of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's "Independent Studies" Policy

Documents Indicate that UNC Again Misled its Accreditation Body, SACS

by Ted Tatos @BlueDevilicious

There has been considerable additional attention as of late on the limit on independent study courses at UNC, in large part because of award-winning News & Observer reporter Dan Kane's latest article. The key issue is whether athletes were given the "benefit" of exceeding this limit, thus rendering them ineligible by UNC's own standards.  The NCAA levied this specific allegation in its Notice of Allegations (NOA) as Allegation 1b, stating:

"Additionally, from the 2006 fall semester and continuing through the 2011 summer semester, the institution provided impermissible extra benefits similar to those articulated above and allowed 10 student-athletes to exceed the limit of independent study credits countable toward graduation. Under the institution's policy, credit hours for independent study courses did not count toward a degree after a student exhausted the institutional 12-hour limitation. By failing to count the anomalous AFRI/AFAM courses as independent study courses, and including these courses as applicable toward graduation, the institution impermissibly allowed 10 student-athletes to exceed the 12-hour limitation. [NCAA Bylaw 16.11.2.1 (2006-07 through 2010-11)]"

NCAA Notice of Allegations at 2.

The NCAA's allegation is based on the information UNC provided to its accreditation body, SACS.  UNC stated that:

This section regarding “Independent Studies for Credit” was first incorporated in the Undergraduate Bulletin in the 2010-2011 edition. A 12-hour limit on departmental independent study credits was initially included in the 2006-2007 Bulletin as an addition to the existing policy on Special Studies for Credit.” Until Fall 2006 there was no defined limit on the number of independent study courses that could be applied toward an undergraduate degree.

UNC Respose to SACS at 100.

Is UNC's statement true?  No, not according to its own documents.

The image below comes from UNC's 1981-1982 Undergraduate Bulletin.  The document clearly indicates that "A student may earn thirty semester hours of credit toward a degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel-Hill through independent study courses, provided they are taken prior to the senior year.  This document indicates that UNC had a policy limiting the number of independent study courses that could be taken for credit toward a degree at least a quarter century before UNC told SACS that the policy began.

But there is more to this story. Despite the factual inaccuracy of UNC's claim to SACS, technically, these are not the "independent studies" at issue in the UNC AFAM fake class scandal.  The "independent study" policy referenced above, and which continued for decades, referred to "correspondence courses", which students could take up to 13 months to complete.  Further, if a student currently attending classes at UNC wanted to take such a course, he/she had to obtain the written permission of the dean. Unless deans at UNC signed off on thousands of enrollments in fake classes, these are not the courses at issue.

The courses at issue are referred to a Special Studies for Credit.

Beginning in 1991-1992, UNC adopted "Special Studies for Credit" policy, as evidenced by the email below.  This email was signed by Karen (likely indicating Karen Moon, UNC's News Director and part of its Media Relations team) and was apparently directed toward Dan Kane.  The email is sent from an individual at public relations firm Edelman to UNC assistant athletic director, Vince Ille.

Though I was unable to find the 1991-1992 bulletin, the 1997 bulletin states that:

This is the policy that limited the number of undergraduate independent study credits, and it was in place over a decade before the 2006 date UNC claimed to its accreditation body. After 2006, the Special Studies for Credit section was modified to include the term "independent study", though the substance was the same.  The limit of 12 hours total and no more than 6 per semester remained the same.

Note that the document refers to "twelve hours of graded special studies and/or independent study credit may be counted toward graduation...".  The evidence from the documents UNC produced as part of the Wainstein investigation confirms that this is the policy that was relied upon, and that independent studies were referred to as "special studies for credit."

In addition, March 2003 UNC report cited by Dan Kane, confirms the existence of the twelve-hour independent study rule.  This also confirms that the independent study rules were referenced in the Special Studies for Credit.  As noted above, this policy existed since 1991-1992.

Why is this important?  First, the documents in this case directly contradict what UNC told its accreditation body, SACS.  The evidence indicates that the independent study policy, listed under "special studies for credit" began 15 years before the 2006 date UNC told SACS.  

This contradiction has implications for the NCAA's allegations against UNC, as it substantially increases the number of athletes affected by Allegation 1b.  For example, athletes such as Rashad McCants, who played on UNC's 2005 NCAA champion men's basketball team, would be in violation of the independent study policy even before the spring 2005 semester, since he had already taken at least 15 credits' worth of such classes.  In the Spring 2005 semester, Rashad McCants took an additional four independent study courses. Since none counted for credit, Mr. McCants was effectively not even enrolled as a student in any classes that counted toward graduation, making him ineligible to play. 

All NCAA eligibility and punishments aside, the most stunning revelation here is that UNC appears to have directly misled its accreditation body, yet again.  Previously, UNC claimed only two people were involved in the academic fraud, Deborah Crowder and Julius Nyang'oro.  The subsequent investigation by Kenneth Wainstein revealed that the fraud was considerably more widespread. Among those found to have been involved, UNC's own Faculty Chair and Director of the Parr Center for Ethics, Jan Boxill, was subsequently asked to resign for "unethical acts."